Ten Tips on Stardom

1.  Have an instinctive understanding of exactly how to hit your key light - something that never failed the Divine Josephine, even when the spotlight was all she had...

2.  Let Joan Blondell be your guide:  always have a positive approach to your grueling glamour regimen (and never, ever be seen without eye makeup, bangles, pumps, and, when situationally appropriate, an adoring attendant).

3.  Develop a trademark expression; extra credit if it can be variously read as vulnerable and alluring at the same time.  You may not hit the heights that Marilyn reached in no small part thanks to hers, but you have to start somewhere...

4.  Equally, however, you mustn't neglect the more ferocious aspect of divalicity; nothing so incites the fans to adoration as an affect just this side of disdain.  Dame Joan, despite an off-stage attitude of almost superhuman cosiness, was no slouch in this regard on stage.

5.  Never pass up an opportunity to let the boys in the stills gallery have a little fun.  If you can't face the prospect of yet another Arbor Day photo spread, at least don't hesitate to show off your hobbies, however implausible.  I don't for a moment believe that Mary Boland was a devoted ping-pong enthusiast, but it made a nice snap for the weekend rotogravures, no?

6.  However, never forget that glamour is job one.  Audiences forgave Lana everything for the better part of four decades, just because she could so reliably give that look.  It takes practice, kids, especially when you're balancing as much off stage as our Miss Turner here.

7.  Keep good company.  Peers and counterparts always make good press - that's why Jerry was almost always seen with one or preferably more of his girls...

8.  ...and at a certain point, cultivate the next generation.  Joan was smart enough to know that she could get away with that hat as long as she was standing next to the ravishing young Mr. Chamberlain.  Do you suppose she's goosing him even as the picture was snapped? (On a side note, I always think of this particular expression of Joan's as her "Mommie's had her vodka" look - it's her own special version of "Keep it together, Minnelli," as you can practically see the self-will that it's taking to keep her upright.)

9.  Never forget that you're Queen of the Lot, even if that lot is only Universal.  It takes a special moxie to wave at your minions and drive your own personal go-kart, but Doris takes it all in stride.

10.  Finally, and when all else fails - endure.

What Do You Go For?

I've been flying solo these last couple of days, with Mr. Muscato on the road for business. As usual in such situations, I have dived into the voluminous Villa Muscato film archive, taking advantage of temporary bachelordom to catch up on various obsessions that the two of us may not entirely share.

Last night's treat was the comparatively least celebrated of Warner Bros.' run of early thirty musical spectaculars, Dames. There are perfectly legitimate reasons that it doesn't have the stature of, say, 42nd Street or Golddiggers of 1933, but it's still a fine evening's entertainment.

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler do their usual business (brash and blushing, respectively) quite competently, and Joan Blondell, as always, livens the proceedings. The plot requires Guy Kibbee and ZaSu Pitts, as Keeler's parents, to bumble and dither as is their wont, but Pitts is oddly absent, doing nothing with what is basically a pretty nothing part (she looks like she wishes she were back with Stroheim in Greed).

The real reason for these pictures, of course, isn't the plot, but rather the numbers, and here Busby Berkeley certainly delivers. From an idyllic Central Park setting for the rather treacly "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips (and a Twinkle in Your Daddy's Eye)" to set the Powell-Keeler romance moving to the title number that highlights the inevitable show-within-a-show, the music moves along briskly. A bizarre Gibson Girl/Gay '90s number, "The Girl at the Ironing Board" gives Blondell the chance to frolic with an entire laundry's worth of en-puppetted long johns (a feint at least in part a result of her advanced pregnancy during filming).

One thing this picture does require is a very high tolerance for the standard that it launched upon the world, "I Only Have Eyes For You," of which one hears a very great deal in the course of the film's 91 minutes. It first appears early in the picture, but then gets the full-fledged demento Berkeley treatment later on, in an extravaganza that imagines the Second Coming as the Apotheosis of Ruby Keeler, or perhaps what Kim Jong Il might get up to if he had an unlimited supply of white organza (and Ruby Keeler). It might seem the last word in Bekeleyiana, but in reality it only sets the stage for the big "Dames" finale, which, like the rest of the best of Berkeley, is basically indescribable.

Actually, it's what Leni Riefenstahl might have done if she'd had better drugs and a sense of humor. In fact, it's odd having seen this movie and the Leni documentary in one week; it causes all sorts of thinking about what was really going on in people's minds in the 1930s.

I've decided that there is a truly fundamental difference between Riefenstahl's massed thousands of perfect Aryans and Berkeley's intricate compositions of giggling Hollywood chorus girls. It's that Leni came out of entertainment (having started as a dancer - of sorts, if the clips available are any indication - and actress) and applied what she had learned there to the glorification of Fascist pomp and circumstance. By contrast, Berkeley took his military-academy background - his love of regimentation, precision, the endless geometric replication of pattern - and applied it to the most basic tropes of show-biz: boy meets girl, kids meet fame (on a soundstage the size of all Burbank, in the company of endless numbers of extras moving in unison).

That is, although in some ways the products seem almost eerily similar, they're actually coming at each other from entirely different universes. One gilds a vacuous evil, giving it a frozen, gimcrack glamor; the other adds a backbone of steel to the June-Moon-Spoon of a thousand nights in Vaudeville, turning it into true cinema that's still, by virtue of its inherent absurdity, gloriously entertaining and oddly human in scale. Surely there can be few less Fascist concepts than 350 dancing Ruby Keelers, let alone having all of them serenaded by the keening croon of the eternal juvenile Dick Powell.

If only he could have done more with poor ZaSu...

My Forgotten Man

It suddenly occurred to me, after all that, that you might like a look for yourself.

Blessings on YouTube, for here it is: The "Remember My Forgotten Man" number, complete with the abrupt ending that must have startled filmgoers more used to cozy fadeouts in the style of 42nd Street.

Seven minutes that prove that even the silliest things (30s backstagers directed by Busy Berkeley, for example) can achieve the sublime. Anyone who doesn't get a chill from Etta Moten's singing and the war/breadline section isn't sentient.

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"; "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams"; this song - the 30s certainly had a way with pop songs in minor keys, no?

Women on the Verge

Mr. Muscato has been traveling this week, so I've been spending my evenings revisiting some old favorite pictures (there are only so many he'll put up with, and God knows he puts up with enough else that I don't say a word).

In any case, last night at the Living Room Rivoli, I took in Gold Diggers of 1933.

It's one of those movies I'm still surprised to be able to see any time I take out the DVD. It was very late to video, and I first encountered it back on 57th Street at the Biograph, one of the last really first-rate art houses in New York - a theatre large and lavish enough that it approximated what it might have been like to go to the movies in 1933.

It's a pretty amazing film - definitely worth a look if it's been a while since you've seen it. It's set, no surprise, in the world of Warner' Broadway backstagers, but it has a genuine edge: the one-two punch of Depression and Prohibition, both fairly explicitly addressed, makes it seem far harder-boiled than I remembered. It's about people who are just this side of hungry and making the best of it, even if it means a little casual theft, flashing a little more than ankle to get a job in the chorus, or taking a rube for the ride of his life.

It uses many of the usual thirties bits (the eccentric producer, the lovestruck juvenile-with-a-secret, Ruby Keeler's patented wide-eyed baby act, et al), but adds its own fillips. The optimism of the opening "We're in the Money" number is immediately undercut when bailiffs arrive to seize the sets and costumes, throwing our heroines out of work and setting the plot in motion.

Aline MacMahon's gold digger, a comic actress looking for her next break, is genuinely predatory, and may or may not be redeemed by genuine affection for her mark at the end. She and Ginger Rogers spar over said mark with real viciousness (and a swift kick under a nightclub table). The girls have among them only enough good clothes for one to run after a producer who may or may not have some jobs to hand out. Even Ruby Keeler gets a petulant moment or two, as well as very clearly understanding - and enjoying - the subtext built right into any number called "Pettin' in the Park."

But most of all, it has "My Forgotten Man." This is the musical number as sociology, a truly chilling combination of spectacle and politics that decries the lot of the working men (and the women who loved them) betrayed by the country's economic collapse. It's like an inversion of the earlier numbers, with flirting couples and lighthearted tap dancing replaced by vignettes of humiliation and poverty and the marching of men in breadlines and off to war.

The song builds from a quiet start, first in recitative delivered by a stock "girl of the streets" type, leaning against her lamppost. Then it's taken up as a blues wail, a song of pain and want (sung, it turns out, by one Emma Moten, who later went on to be Gershwin's chosen Bess and a prominent civil-rights activist*). Finally, it's shouted by a mostly male chorus, accompanied by scenes that startlingly combine the stagy - it's a number in a show, after all, so we see the turntable and other stage machinery - and realistic, including battle casualties with more realistically gory injuries than any actual war movie of the era. It's a slap-in-the-face reminder of how difficult and dangerous the early 30s really were, and it's the last thing we see, for the plot gets tidied out of the way so thoroughly we don't even get a last glimpse of the (now successful, employed, married) characters.

In the middle of both the golddigging plot and this climactic number is Joan Blondell, who is as always an unalloyed pleasure.

She's the human face of golddigging, a girl perfectly capable of making her way in the world, but whose sense of self is unshakable enough to know she has a price, and it's more than she's being offered by the stage-door Johnnys and predatory Brahmins she's met on Broadway.

In any case, it's a good night at the movies. What do you suppose Hollywood will make of this emerging global financial meltdown?

* The numbers of the show-within-a-show are surprisingly diverse: "Pettin' in the Park" takes in a rainbow of flirting couples, and "My Forgotten Man" has players who would look more at home in Dorothea Lange's Depression photos than a Broadway revue. The actual Great White Way was less inclusive; the first integrated cast was still a decade in the future in 1933.

Three on a Match

Here's a trio that must have been interesting backstage:

Blondell, Winwood, Bankhead: Hear No Evil, See No Evil, and Evil

How, one wonders, could a play starring these three Graces/Furies/Harpies not have been a smash? Well, Crazy October, a 1958 casualty up in New Haven, was definitely not.

Perhaps it was, if this summary is to be believed, because the plot sounds like the setup for a slightly queasy joke: "Tallulah plays Daisy, the proprietess of a roadside inn which she shares with a prostitute (Blondell) and a widow (Winwood), who is trying to get Daisy to cremate her husband."

In this context, why does "cremate her husband" sound like a euphemism for something much dirtier? And why is dear Miss Winwood dressed like Mamie Eisenhower? And to what extent is Miss Blondell actually having to prop her up? And (perhaps most tellingly regarding the fate of the play) why does Tallulah look as if she is going to swivel her head, drop her trick jaw, and devour the other two at one go?

We shall never know.